@sir IRC is kind of broken as designed; the server pretty much expects to be talking directly to the user, so there are fundamental things missing, like knowing which past request an error message is a response to, or knowing whether a message you see or sent has been truncated because it was too long (or even what the length limit is)

@sir your client silently corrupting your data before sending it to the server is a solution in limited circumstances, but even so, it doesn't solve the problem, just makes it less frequent; and the institutionalized behavior when you violate the well-defined limit is to undetectably corrupt your data further, which is not reasonable behavior

@kragen this particular problem can be fixed in a backwards compatible way, though. What other problems do you have to complain about? Think carefully about whether or not they actually require incompatible changes before you answer

And for the record, IRC has been working well for over 30 years despite these "deficiencies", far longer than any of its competitors have come close to

@sir What is your proposal for fixing it in a backwards-compatible way?

IRC has *never* worked *well*. I've been using it since before Undernet existed (about 25 years ago) and running a server with some friends for most of that, I've written a couple of (shitty) IRC clients, and I'm hanging out with the ircII maintainer right now (ironically, on ICB rather than IRC). I could be mistaken about its problems but if so it's not due to the kind of profound ignorance you seem to be assuming :)

@kragen just send clients their hostmask so they can compute the length limit?

IRC has always worked more than well enough. I use it all day every day and pretty much never have issues. I used Matrix for all of 20 minutes and I was disconnected twice, had constant latency spikes, and couldn't join channels or start PMs without opening up a resource intensive web giga-application.

@kragen IRC can totally handle millions of users. Networks handle upwards of a hundred thousand every day without breaking a sweat. Some single channels have thousands of users alone. The design is quite scalable

@sir I know very smart programmers who devoted years of their lives to trying to get IRC to handle millions of users without success, though hey, maybe that's improved since then. Current networks are typically under 100K users and still have netsplits; fixing netsplits probably requires a new server-to-server protocol. Skype, by contrast, has handled tens of millions of users for a bit over a decade. I don't use it anymore because it's proprietary, but it does exist.

@sir Yeah, of course any distributed system on a partitioned network will suffer a network partition. By "netsplit" I was referring to IRC's handling of that situation by irreversibly losing messages. (At least nowadays it doesn't enable randos to steal your channel — but fixing that required a backwards-incompatible protocol upgrade.)

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